The Wanderers
Redheaded Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca—Cabeza de Vaca translates as Cow’s Head—was a man of considerable pride and, apparently, some wry humor. In 1483, about three years after his birth, its exact date unknown, his paternal grandfather, Pedro de Vera, conquered the Grand Canary Island off the northwest coast of Africa for Spain, a feat that brought a glow, in court circles, to the name de Vera. And then there was his mother’s name, Teresa Cabeza de Vaca. Legend avers that back in 1212 her ancestor, a shepherd, had used the skull of a cow to mark a mountain pass that let a Christian army surprise and defeat its Mohammedan enemy. The shepherd’s sovereign thereupon bestowed the name Cabeza de Vaca on the family. Young Alvar Nuñez must have enjoyed the story, for he adopted his mother’s surname rather than his father’s, a not unusual custom in Spain.
He fought in several battles for Ferdinand and Isabella and for their grandson, Charles V, and was severely wounded at least once. In 1526, when he was about 46, Charles appointed him royal treasurer of a large expedition Pánfilo de Narváez proposed to lead into Florida, a name that then covered a huge region stretching from the peninsula around the dimly known north Gulf Coast to the Rio de las Palmas in northeastern Mexico.[1] If treasure was found—and treasure was Narváez’s goal—it would be up to Cabeza de Vaca to make sure the king received his 20 percent share. Other financial duties were involved, so that altogether it seemed a promising appointment for a middle-aged ex-soldier and able administrator. As events turned out, Vaca could hardly have suffered a greater misfortune.
The problem, which merits a digression, was Pánfilo de Narváez, the expedition’s leader. About the same age as Cabeza de Vaca, he was tall, courtly, and deep voiced, qualities that helped marvelously in advancing his career. He had prospered as a pioneer settler in Jamaica, and between 1511 and 1515 had aided Diego Velásquez in the conquest of Cuba, a feat which had elevated Velásquez to the governorship of the island. Both men added to their riches by using enforced Indian labor to exploit the island’s shallow placer mines and embryonic plantations. And although both could easily have retired to comfortable estates, each wanted more money, a common itch.
Charles, King of Spain, 1516-56, and Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, 1519-58. Under his rule, Spain carved out a new empire in the Americas to go with its dominions in Europe.
As chief administrator of Cuba, Velásquez was allowed by the government in Spain to authorize explorations of the Caribbean. In 1517 and 1518 he exercised this right by licensing seafarers to explore and trade along the coasts of Yucatan and Mexico, capture Indian slaves, and scout out the country for booty. In return for the licenses, Velásquez would share in whatever gains resulted.
Of his searchers for new wealth, the one whose name would ring down through history was Hernán Cortés. Cocky, crafty, reckless, and adept with the ladies, Cortés had come to Cuba as Velásquez’s private secretary at the same time Narváez had. He, too, had prospered, but unlike Narváez he had quarreled sharply with his former boss. Though a reconciliation had been effected, it was touchy. Still, Cortés had money and was willing to spend it on risky adventures, and so, in 1518, he was authorized to explore Mexico’s eastern coast. He assembled a fleet of 11 ships, 16 precious horses, and prodigious stores of armaments. People grew so excited about his prospects that he easily recruited 500 or so soldiers and 100 sailors—nearly half of Cuba’s male population.
While he was preparing his expedition, some of Velásquez’s other scouts returned with rumors of a fabulous empire of Aztec Indians and their capital city, Tenochtitlán, built on an island in a shallow lake that filled most of a high mountain valley in Mexico. Growing suddenly nervous about Cortés—how loyal would he be with treasure in front of him and an army at his back?—Velásquez in February 1519 revoked Cortés’s commission. Defying him, Cortés slipped away and disappeared.
One of the world’s most fabulous adventures followed. Landing on the Yucatan coast, Cortés rescued a survivor of one of Velásquez’s earlier expeditions—a man who in his captivity had learned the Mayan language. Employing the one-time prisoner as an interpreter, Cortés turned his fleet northward, probing the coast. Such resistance as developed among the Indians was quickly crushed by the terrifying aspect of the expedition’s few horses. During one of those aborted battles, Cortés rescued yet another captive, a woman named Malinche whom the priest with the expedition baptized and named Marina.
Hernán Cortés with 600 men and 16 horses overthrew the Aztec empire. This illustration of the conquistador was made from life.
The map traces his route from the coast to Tenochtitlán in 1519.
Marina was a Nahua, or Aztec. While in captivity she too had learned the Mayan tongue and could converse with the rescued Spaniard. Through this linguistic conduit, the conquistadores received exciting information about Tenochtitlán, the glittering city of the Aztecs, predecessor of today’s Mexico City. A dazzling prize! And why, Cortés surely wondered, should he share any of it with Diego Velásquez, sitting safely at home in Cuba?
On April 21, 1519, the fleet dropped anchor at the sea end of a trail leading to the city. There Cortés laid the foundations of a port that he named Vera Cruz (today Veracruz). Calling his men together—they, too, were excited about prospects—he prevailed on the majority to elect him captain-general of the expedition, a move that in Cortés’s mind freed him of his obligations to Velásquez and made him answerable only to King Charles V. Simultaneously, he sent emissaries to Moctezuma, emperor of the Aztecs, asking for an audience.
The timing could hardly have been more propitious. The Aztec rule was harsh; subject nations seethed with discontent; Tenochtitlán itself was torn with dissensions. Fearful that the strangers might be able to capitalize on the undercurrents of the rebellion—and fearful, too, that the newcomers might somehow be descendants of the ancient serpent-god, Quetzalcoatl—Moctezuma tried to buy off the Spaniards. Down to Veracruz went five noble diplomats accompanied by 100 porters laden with treasure. All of it was breathtaking, but what really dumbfounded the Spaniards were two metal disks the size of cartwheels. One, representing the Sun God, was of solid gold. The other, dedicated to the Moon, was of silver.
Cortés declined to respond as expected. He loaded the treasure onto one of his ships and ordered the captain to sail directly to Spain, where he would use the booty to win the approval of Charles V. The rest of the ships he burned so that none of the men in the command who were still loyal to Velásquez could return to Cuba and stir up trouble there. As for his own men, they too would fight harder if they knew that no ships were waiting to evacuate them if they were defeated.
Xipe Totec, Aztec god of fertility, one of many gods in the Aztec pantheon, redrawn from the original codex. He wears the flayed skin of a sacrificial victim. Ritual killing horrified Spaniards and in their eyes justified the conquest. But to Aztecs the gods and their extravagant costumes were an important part of everyday life, condensations of vital social truths.
In November 1519, Tenochtitlán capitulated after a short, hard fight. Cortés took Moctezuma hostage and then paused to contemplate his enormous prize.
Unknown to the victors, the captain of the ship bound for Spain did pause in Cuba to check on some land he owned there. It was a short stay but long enough for the sailors to talk. Astounded couriers sped the word to Velásquez. The governor was outraged. He was already at work gathering a strong force of 900 men equipped with 80 horses and 13 ships to pursue Cortés and arrest him for defying orders. Doubly furious at what seemed to him Cortés’s latest treachery, he put Pánfilo de Narváez in charge of a punitive force to bring the disloyal conquistador back to Cuba in chains!
Warnings from Veracruz reached Cortés at the Aztec capital. He reacted with characteristic boldness. Leaving two hundred men at Tenochtitlán, he marched the rest swiftly to the coast. No one there anticipated him so soon. Late at night, when most of his would-be captors were asleep, he waded his men across a swollen stream and attacked without warning. During the chaos that followed, a lance point put out one of Narváez’s eyes. By dawn the field was in Cortés’s hands. Most of Narváez’s men, hearing of the riches of Tenochtitlán, deserted their commander and swore fealty to the victor.
While Narváez remained under guard at Veracruz, nursing his wound, Cortés marched back to rejoin the rest of his men at Tenochtitlán. The Aztecs let the returning soldiers reach the palace compound and then attacked in waves of thousands. The hostage emperor, Moctezuma, was stoned to death by his own people while pleading for peace. Trying once again to use the night as cover, Cortés on June 30, 1520, led hundreds of Spaniards and several thousand Indian allies onto one of the stone-and-earth causeways that connected the island city to the mainland. Aztecs swarmed after them in canoes. On that famed noche triste—night of sorrows—850 Spaniards and upwards of 4,000 of their allies died.
Fortune shifted quickly, however. Wheeling around on the plains outside the city and making adroit use of his few horses and guns, Cortés defeated the army pursuing him. Doggedly then he put together a fresh army of Indians who hated the Aztecs and of whites who were dribbling into Mexico to see what was going on. The next year, on August 13, 1521, he recaptured Tenochtitlán, again at heavy cost. By twisting logic only a little, he could have blamed all these troubles on Narváez’s inept interference. He did not. He treated the man kindly and then sent him home to Spain with, so it is said, a bagful of golden artifacts.
“I saw the things which have been brought to the King from the new land of gold, a sun all of gold a whole fathom broad, and a moon all of silver of the same size, also two rooms full of the armour of the people there, and all manner of wondrous weapons of [the Aztecs], harnesses and darts, very strange clothing, beds and all kinds of wonderful objects of human use, much better worth of seeing than prodigies. These things are so precious that they are valued at a hundred thousand florins. All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw among them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of people in foreign lands. Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.”—Albrecht Dürer upon seeing the Aztec objects Cortés sent Charles V in 1519.
In Spain Narváez intrigued against the nation’s hero, as Cortés then was, as best he could. He also yearned for a conquest in which he could redeem himself. When the governorship of Florida fell open, he applied for the position and won. His plan was to establish his first colony at Río de las Palmas, north of Pánuco, on Mexico’s northeast coast, where Cortés had already placed a defensive outpost. From there he could put pressure on his enemy, who many of the king’s council thought was growing too big for his boots. He could also search for the treasure that he was sure lay somewhere in the north, in the land from which he supposed the Aztecs had originally come—land where the fabled Seven Cities might lie.
Six hundred soldiers, sailors, and would-be settlers, a few of whom had their wives with them, left Spain aboard five ships in June 1527. One of the adventurers was Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, making his first trip to the New World. It was a hard journey—desertions, groundings, a deadly hurricane, and finally a series of adverse storms that drove the little fleet off its intended course for the Río de las Palmas to a landing on the west coast of the Florida peninsula, probably opposite the head of Tampa Bay.
In view of the peninsula’s nearness to Cuba, remarkably little was known about it. Beginning with Alonso Alvarez de Pineda in 1519, a few sea explorers had groped along its western coast on their way to Mexico. Occasional traders and slave hunters had poked into some of its lovely bays—and had often taken severe trouncings from the Indians for their pains. Juan Ponce de León, the only man to try to establish a colony there, was mortally wounded during the attempt.
Tenochtitlán, Capital of the Aztec Empire
Tenochtitlán, predecessor of today’s Mexico City, was one of the most magnificent cities in the world when Cortés and his small army arrived in 1519. The sight of the radiant city in the center of a large lake astonished the Spaniards. “We did not know what to say, or whether what appeared before us was real,” wrote a soldier, “for there were great cities along the shore and many others in the lake, all filled with canoes, and at intervals along the causeways there were many bridges....”
About 250,000 persons lived here and in its sister city Tlatelolco (left). The market place was huge. “Some of the soldiers with us had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople and all over Italy and Rome, and they said they had never seen a public square so perfectly laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.”
At the center of the city—and the Aztec religion—was the Templo Major, a complex of temples and shrines to the gods of fertility and war—the sources of Aztec power. The surfaces of the temples were richly ornamented in symbols and myths that expressed their complete vision of life. It was this city, which governed a vast empire in central Mexico, that the intrepid Cortés and his band overthrew in 1521. Within a few years a splendid and original civilization lay in ruins.
Narváez must have known of the dangers, but when he saw a yellow object among some fish nets in a village from which the Indians had fled on his approach, he jumped to the conclusion that it was gold. Hopefully, he showed the object to some Indians he lured into camp, they pointed north and said vehemently, “Apalachee! Apalachee!” Straightway Narváez decided to march there overland with the main part of his force, 40 of them mounted on the skin-and-bone horses that had survived the sea journey. The rest of the group, including its women, were directed to sail along the coast to a harbor supposedly known to the expedition’s pilot. There the two groups would come together again.
The Aztecs and kindred people were wonderful artists in gold. The lifesize breastplate is Mixtecan, perhaps the representation of the god of death.
The gold plug is an Aztecan facial ornament. Nobles and military leaders routinely wore plugs as a sign of rank. The plugs were inserted through a hole below the lip or in the cheek.
Cabeza de Vaca protested. They couldn’t be sure they understood the Indians properly. Would the two parties be able to find each other again on the intricate coast? They did not have food enough for exploring. First they should locate their colony in an area suitable for farming and send the ships to Cuba for supplies. Time enough then to search for gold.
Narváez waved him aside. The ships sailed on and the land party headed north, each man carrying two pounds of biscuits and half a pound of bacon. After 15 days of hunger they luckily seized some Indians who led them to a field of maize ripe enough for harvesting. Strengthened somewhat but beset by clouds of insects, they waded on through bogs, built rafts for crossing rivers—a drowned horse fed some of them one night—and then entered a region of enormous trees where piles of fallen timber created an almost impassable maze.
Apalachee, located close to the site of modern Tallahassee, turned out to be a village of 40 small houses roofed with thatch. No gold. Disgruntled, Narváez imprisoned an Apalachee chief and appropriated some of the houses for shelter. The villagers retaliated by setting fire to the buildings, a tactic that became common during later years.
The invaders stayed 25 days, scouting the surrounding country and resting as best they could under constant sniping by displaced inhabitants. They then headed west toward another town of reputed richness, Aute, near present-day St. Marks, on Apalachee Bay. Indians shadowed them, killing or wounding several men with hard-pointed arrows capable of piercing armor. Cabeza de Vaca was one of those nicked.
On the Spaniards’ approach, the inhabitants of Aute burned their huts and fled. There was no gold in the ruins. No silver. No jewels. And no sign of Spanish ships in the bay. As a mysterious fever began felling the men one by one, Narváez said that Pánuco could not be far away. If they could build boats....
How? The men knew nothing about the art of shipbuilding. The only materials they had were what they and their horses wore. Total helplessness—until God’s will, Cabeza de Vaca wrote years later, prompted one anonymous fellow to say he thought he could make a bellows out of deerskin and wooden pipes. With the bellows they could produce heat enough to transform spurs, bridle-bits, crossbow darts, and iron stirrups into nails. Excited by that proposal, a Greek spoke up, saying he knew how to manufacture waterproofing pitch from the resin in the pine trees surrounding them.
Working with the energy of desperation, the men put together, between August 5 and September 20 five crude boats, each about 33 feet long. They made sails out of their clothing, rope out of horse hair and palmetto fibre, anchors out of stone. Those not involved in the construction used the surviving horses—a diminishing number since they killed one every third day for food—to bring in 640 bushels of corn from the fields at Aute. Several men died from fever or wounds received from the Indians—not altogether an ill wind, since the five boats could not have carried more than the 250 or so persons who overloaded them at sailing time. Narváez, exercising a leader’s prerogative, picked out the best boat and strongest crew for himself.
They crawled along close to the shore, sat out storms behind islands, lost more men to Indian attack, and suffered so terribly from thirst—the water bottles they had made from horsehide soon rotted—that four of them drank salt water in their misery and perished. A more historic moment than any of them would ever realize came toward the end of October 1528, when, as they were edging out past some marshy islands, a powerful current of fresh water swept them far out to sea. They had discovered the mouth of a great river—the Mississippi.
As they worked back toward the coast on the far side of the river mouth, winds and sea currents quickened their pace. Despite strenuous efforts the crews could not keep the boats together. The men with Cabeza de Vaca grew so exhausted that they shouted to Narváez to toss them a rope and help pull them along. Narváez refused. “When the sun sank,” the treasurer recalled later, “all who were in my boat were fallen one on another, so near to death that there were few of them in a state of sensibility.” They lay inert throughout the night. At dawn—it was November 6, 1528—Cabeza de Vaca heard the tumult of breakers but could take no measures to meet the threat. A giant wave lifted the boat out of the water and dropped it with a crash on what was either Galveston Island off the coast of Texas or a nearby stub of a peninsula.
The “hunch-backed cows” that Vaca and his companions saw were the wide-ranging American bison. “They have small horns like the cows of Morocco,” he wrote. “The hair is very long and wooly like a rug. Some are tawny, others are black. In my judgment the flesh is finer and fatter than cows from [Spain].”
Karankawa Indians who had gathered at the spot to dig roots succored them. A little later they joined the crew of another capsized boat that had been commanded by captains Alonso de Castillo and Andrés Dorantes, whose black slave Estéban was with him. The combined group numbered about 80, most of them infirm and next to naked. Numbly, they tried to repair Cabeza de Vaca’s boat so the strongest could sail to Pánuco for help. It sank. Four volunteers then agreed to try to reach Mexico by land. They never returned.
A winter of intense cold, starvation, and fever left only 15 alive, Cabeza de Vaca barely so. In the spring, 13 of the survivors moved off with the greater part of the Indians in search of food, leaving Cabeza de Vaca and a second invalid, Lope de Oviedo, behind with a small band. As soon as Cabeza de Vaca was able to work, the Indians set him to digging roots and carrying firewood. To escape the drudgery he became a trader, traveling far inland with a pack of shells, flints, cane for arrow shafts, sinews and so on for barter. During the wanderings he became the first European known to have seen bison.
His great desire was to walk southwest along the coast until he reached other men of his own kind, and he urged Oviedo to join him. The fellow kept promising he would as soon as he was better. Not wishing to desert a fellow Spaniard, Cabeza de Vaca wasted four years through one postponement after another. At last they started, but then Oviedo caved in with fear and turned back, preferring familiar miseries to the unknown.
Shortly thereafter, in 1532, in the bottomlands of the Colorado River of Texas, where several bands were harvesting walnuts, Cabeza de Vaca stumbled joyously across Castillo, Dorantes, and the vigorous black Estéban. The trio were also ready to strike for Mexico if they could escape from their masters, but they warned against fierce tribes to the southwest. They should try a route farther north.
After two years of interruption and frustrations they made the break. The incredible journey, broken by long stays at various Indian camps, lasted two years. At times they traveled alone. More often they were accompanied by Indians. After they had chanced to pray over an ailing man, who thereupon leaped up and declared himself cured, they became revered as supernatural medicinemen, children of the sun. Their marches, often scouted out for them by Estéban, who also served as interpreter—he learned six languages during those arduous years—became triumphal processions. Sometimes, says Cabeza de Vaca, as many as 4,000 Indians would accompany them from one village to the next, a figure that, as Bernard DeVoto has pointed out, should be taken as a way of saying “quite a few.” Those who escorted them would often loot the first village they reached, whereupon its inhabitants, moving on with the quartet to another village, would recoup their losses by plundering it.
What route did they follow? No one knows. Cabeza de Vaca’s descriptions of Indian customs, rivers, mountains, vegetation, and so on have led some students to suggest that the wanderers may have gone as far north as southern New Mexico and Arizona. Others think they traveled out of west Texas into Chihuahua. But whatever the way, it eventually merged with one of the trade trails that ran between the Pueblo Indian towns of the Southwest and those in the heavily populated, southward trending valleys of Sonora. They reached the Sonora area in the spring of 1536.
What had they seen along the way? Not much, according to a report that the survivors sent to the audiencia in Hispaniola in 1537. Just buffalo robes that had originated in the country of the plains Indians and beautifully woven cotton mantas that their native hosts had obtained by trade with Indians somewhere in the north (probably the Pueblos of the Rio Grande). Bits of coral and turquoise. And miles and miles of desolation, thinly populated by primitive tribes. Writing a memoir of the trip six years later, Cabeza de Vaca improved only slightly on the tales. In Sonora, he related, he was given five emeralds shaped like arrowheads; the donors said the “jewels” had been purchased in the north with parrot feathers and plumes. Sadly, he lost the five artifacts before anyone else saw them. He also told of handling a small bell made of copper and of hearing stories about large cities filled with big houses and surrounded by boundless fields of maize.
Such reports were too vague and understated to create much popular excitement—at first. But as Antonio de Mendoza, New Spain’s first and recently arrived Viceroy, realized, the calm might not last. For a similar story told a few years earlier to the infamous Nuño de Guzmán by an Indian slave named Tejo had stirred up a violent reaction.
At the time Guzmán had been governor of Pánuco on Mexico’s northeast coast and was making a fortune selling slaves to plantations throughout the West Indies. But that wasn’t enough, and his ears pricked up when he listened to Tejo telling about a trip with his father to seven marvelous cities far to the northwest—cities whose streets were lined with the shops of goldsmiths and silversmiths.
The story may well have had an element of truth in it. If a trader kept traveling northwest from Pánuco—and some of Mexico’s early Indian traders were far-ranging—he would eventually reach the impressive pueblo towns of today’s New Mexico. Where the notion of goldsmiths came from is something else, but Guzman believed it because he wanted to.
Instead of taking a direct line to his goal, he put together a strong force, fought his way across the mountains to the west coast, and hewed out, as a base of operations for a thrust along the trade trails leading north, the all-but-independent province of Nueva Galicia. (It embraced the better part of the present-day Mexican states of Nayarit and Sinaloa.) Illness and then his arrest for his slave-dealings put a stop to the northern plans, but the appearance of the Vaca party out of the wilderness might, Mendoza feared, lead the great Cortés to appropriate the idea for himself.
Cortés was ripe for trouble. Because of his insubordination to Diego Velásquez of Cuba, the king had refused to name him Viceroy of New Spain, but then had tried to compensate for the injustice, as Cortés considered it, by naming him the Marquís of the Valley of Oaxaca and giving him the right to explore the South Seas (south of Asia) for new principalities. On their quests some of his ship captains stirred Guzmán’s jealousy by sailing north along the coast of Nueva Galicia. When Guzmán seized one of those ships in the port of Chiametla, the Marquís rushed up with a small army and took it back. He then used that ship to cross what he called the Sea of Cortés (today’s Gulf of California) and claim possession, in the name of the king, of pearl fisheries his mariners had discovered at La Paz in what we call Baja California. The fisheries were not proving lucrative, however, and the least sign that something better existed farther north might tempt him to push on.
It behooved Mendoza, as the king’s representative, to move first, before New Spain’s legitimate northward expansion was halted by one of these semi-autonomous conquistadores. Dutifully reporting each of his moves to Charles V—caution was part of his nature—he asked, in turn, Castillo, Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca to lead a small exploring party into the north and learn what was really there. Not surprisingly, in view of their experiences, each refused.
In 1537, Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain. Skeptics say he wanted to persuade the king to appoint him adelantado of Florida so that he could move independently into the north from that direction. On reaching Madrid, however, he found that Charles had already given the post to Hernando de Soto.
Years later one of De Soto’s Portuguese officers from the town of Elvas—he identified himself only as a hidalgo (gentleman) of Spain—wrote that De Soto offered to take Cabeza de Vaca along as second in command for the sake of his guidance. Again the wanderer declined. But, said the hidalgo, whose accuracy cannot be checked, Vaca did drop hints to his friends and relatives that led them to sell everything they had in order to buy enough equipment to join the expedition. Possibly. But all we really know is that Cabeza de Vaca, the only man to brush against both of the entradas that gave the world its first views of what became the United States, never returned there himself. He was sent to South America instead.
Mendoza of course learned by ship of De Soto’s appointment and of necessity had to assume that one of the new adelantado’s goals would be the Seven Cities. So now he had twin worries, Cortés in the west, De Soto in the east. But before considering the steps he took to checkmate them, it is well to look at De Soto’s adventure, for he is the one who, through sheer luck, had the head start.
The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca
NARVÁEZ EXPEDITION Santiago, Cuba {west Florida coast}: Narváez Expedition lands April 1526 Apalachee Aute: Expedition builds boats CABEZA DE VACA {Texas coast}: Expedition wrecks; Cabeza de Vaca continues overland Colorado River Pecos River Gila River Rio Sonora Corazones Culiacán: Cabeza de Vaca arrives 1536
Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, sole survivors of the ill-fated Narváez expedition (1527), were the first Europeans to cross the North American continent. They spent 8 years traveling 6,000 miles through the interior of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico. The journey itself was an incredible feat of human stamina and pluck. Equally remarkable is Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his adventure. La Relación, first published In 1542, revised Spanish conceptions about the size and nature of the continent north of Mexico. The book is also the first detailed description of native Americans. In his wanderings Cabeza de Vaca came to admire Indians, whom he came to see as fellow humans who could be won over only by kindness. His book—which can be considered the beginning of American literature—is a record of both a physical and a spiritual journey.
Mangrove near De Soto National Memorial. Thickets of this plant once formed great barriers along the Florida shore.